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And this creates a bit of an oddity, because in the Clone Wars, the Republic fleet is essentially built around fast carriers – the Venators – and their fighters
by fbdab103 2y ago
And this creates a bit of an oddity, because in the Clone Wars, the Republic fleet is essentially built around fast carriers – the Venators – and their fighters, whereas it is the CIS fleet which has specialized gunboats (along with the slower Lucrehulks that function as carriers), but by the time we get to the Empire, the doctrine has switched: the ISD is clearly a gun platform first and foremost, which carries its own fighter screen, but expects to win with its primary battery, not its (flimsy) TIE-Fighters
Not steeped in Star Wars lore, but I thought there was an in-novel explanation that the Emperor was planning on defending against a superior alien threat who had enormous planet-sized ships. For which the Death Star and other heavy guns would make sense.
- vundercind 2y agoOh wow, I bailed on the EU well before that stuff, didn’t realize how close it ended up getting to the larger plot of the last couple Frank Herbert Dune books.
- quartesixte 2y agoYeah people pine for the old EU canon (Legends, as it's now called?) but the content that placed itself way after RoTJ got really bizarre. Not happy with the Sequel Trilogy's handling of the universe either, but I don't know if movie-goers would have been able to stomach something like the whole Mara Jade plot or Yuzahn Vong War. >how close it ended up getting to the larger plot of the last couple Frank Herbert Dune books. My understanding is that Sci-Fi writing for established franchises during the 80s - 90s was kind of a small circle of people. The influence would have been unavoidable. And they also often wrote for multiple franchises too.
- vundercind 2y agoYeah even most of the early stuff was pretty awful. You’d get the odd cool idea, but practically none of the material is better than mediocre (no, not even that trilogy). Many of the authors didn’t seem to understand Star Wars at all, and got the feel all wrong—in fact, in a lot of cases I wonder whether they’d just touched up a failed manuscript or partially-finished-but-not-promising draft with Star Wars colored markers, and sent that to the publisher. Stackpole was a rare exception, and Zahn kinda. But even those relatively bright points suffered terribly from Star Wars being almost intrinsically a visual beast. It’s so tied into pastiche of other visual media that it’s remarkably difficult to get it right in print, while the formula for making a decent Star Wars film or show is easier than damn near any other franchise ever: pick one or two things, at least one of “genre” fiction, rip them off completely, and put Star Wars lipstick on it. That’s the whole deal for making a pretty good Star Wars thing. It’s all The Mandalorian did and it worked better than nearly any other efforts at Star Wars since the original trilogy. Frankly, it’s incredible that so many screenwriters and directors seem to to struggle with this (hell, even Lucas). Star Wars books, though? That’s hard mode.
- PoignardAzur 2y agoI think it makes sense without much analysis or imagining that they're preparing to fight cthulu. The simplest explanation is that the Empire's military doctrine doesn't make any strategic sense, and Imperial decision-makers all want the biggest, scariest ships possible for selfish reasons, and everything else flows from that. They rationalize it with speeches about how fear will totally keep the rebels at bay (unlike the last ten times they tried it), but at their core they just want the biggest toys.